This plugin performs Cygwin path conversion before forking new processes

Applicable situations

One of the challenge in Hudson is how to cope with a heterogeneous cluster (that includes Windows and Unix.) Often you need such a cluster so that you have all the testing environments for your supported platforms, but it makes it harder for jobs to utilize the cluster effectively, because your shell script that run on Unix doesn't run on Windows, and your batch files for Windows won't run on Unix.

One way to cope with this problem is to use Cygwin. This creates a Unix like environment on Windows, so that your build/test scripts can always be written as Unix shell scripts, even when they run on Windows.

This also allows you to mostly use Unix paths on specifying your tool locations (such as JDKs, Ant, CVS, etc.), except it doesn't quite work with Cygwin. You say your shell is in "/bin/bash", and indeed as far as Cygwin is concerned, it's there, but when Hudson forks a new shell, it's somewhere like "c:\cygwin\bin\bash" — you'd need a Cygwin path conversion to be able to successfully fork a process!

This plugin does just that; With this plugin, Hudson converts the executable path to Windows style via cygpath.

To recap,

You install Cygwin on all the Windows slaves

Jobs on Hudson that assume Unix environment can now run on all the slaves (including Windows ones)

In the system configuration, you use Unix paths for all your tools.

Changelog

Version 1.5 (Nov 7, 2011)

Updated to work correctly on 64bit Windows JVMs.

Version 1.4 (Nov 7, 2011)

Updated to work with Cygwin 1.7

Version 1.3 (Dec 30 2009)

Locate cygpath on the slave node instead of master

Fix for when cygpath is found in PATH instead of registry

Version 1.2 (Aug 20 2009)

The plugin now locates cygpath.exe from registry entry, so that it works even if cygpath is not in PATH. (issue #4275)